Ryan Farisco

Professional Experience

• Bug Bounty Program: Managed hackerone.com program to identify security vulnerabilities and ensured that reports were validated and remediated promptly.
• DevOps Principal Principle: Driven by the fundamental philosophy that "every team should be able to build, deploy, and operate their own applications." Championed full-stack ownership principles, empowering engineers through the creation of self-service tools for the entire software development lifecycle.
• Infrastructure Consolidation: Led post-merger migration and consolidation of application and database infrastructure, reducing operational complexity and cost.
• Project AWS SSO: Created project plan and executed the implementation of AWS SSO for all employees. This included creation of IaC templates for groups, policies, and roles, as well as integration with Okta for single sign-on.
• Project Claude: Implemented AWS Bedrock access for Claude models by creating credential helper binary which was distributed via internal CLI tooling, enabling seamless local access to various AI models for engineers to test capabilities and drive innovation.
• Project DevOps And You: Created a comprehensive onboarding process and training program for new starters, including video content that covers infrastructure design, self-service and observability tools. This resulted in measurable success by the ability of new starters to confidently deploy their own applications and resources within days of onboarding.
• Project GitHub SSO: Implemented GitHub SSO with Okta SCIM company wide. Ensured seamless integration with no downtime resulting in increased security access controls and improved user experience.
• Project Incident.io: Replaced PagerDuty for all on call rotations across engineering organization, resulting in simplified alerting configuration and universal incident management workflow.
• Team Building: Organized multiple in-person events to build team cohesiveness and increase communication levels, fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment. Scaled team size by hiring and mentoring new engineers ensuring confidence in their abilities to succeed. Scheduled and organized weekly office hours to provide support and guidance for anything infrastructure related across the company.

• Cost Optimization: Implemented cost allocation tags in order to create reports to understand spend and utilization. Reports assisted in purchasing reserved instance contracts which resulted in significant cost savings.
• Operations: Identified redundant infrastructure components for decommissioning or replacement with appropriately sized resources. Created real-time monitoring and graphs to monitor application / infrastructure metrics. Set up alerts against monitoring for any breaching thresholds.
• Performance Efficiency: Ensured that version updates, security patches and any maintenance were scheduled and integrated promptly. Promoted prototyping and proof of concept solutions utilizing serverless technologies.
• Reliability: Created automated containerized deployment process in ECS with stateless self-healing auto-scale groups to ensure that application resilience was paramount. Implemented CircleCI and created CI/CD workflow into non-production environments.
• Security: Complete audit of all login accounts, IAM keys, load balancers, API keys/tokens. Identified and created a plan to mitigate against identified risks. Enforce principle of least privilege across all infrastructure. Enabled data encryption in transit and at rest. Enabled CloudTrail for accountability and tracing.

• AWS Management: Total accountability for AWS with $35K monthly spend.
• CI/CD & Mobile Deployment: Technical lead for multi-microservice CI/CD workflows; created iOS mobile app build and release automation.
• Container Orchestration: Researched and implemented compute clusters for containerized application deployments.
• Database Administration: End-to-end administration of multiple NoSQL databases from POC to production operations.
• Team Management: Hired and managed a team of engineers to support the growth of the company, created onboarding processes and fostered a culture of continuous curiosity, learning and development.

• Automation & Testing: Implemented deployment and testing automation utilizing JMeter load testing framework.
• High Availability: Built and maintained uptime of high availability AWS environments. Extensively troubleshooted deployments, proactively monitored to resolve errors and mitigated accordingly.
• Multi-Region Operations: Responsible for entire AWS cloud infrastructure from development to production for pinchme.com and pinchme.com.au.
• Performance Optimization: Conducted infrastructure benchmarking and optimization initiatives to enhance system performance.
• Technical Advisory: Guided engineering team with all AWS infrastructure related design and implementation.

• AWS Cloud Migration: Led strategic migration from on-premise to AWS infrastructure through competitive RFP process, delivering 60% cost reduction while improving scalability and reliability.
• Infrastructure Leadership: Managed enterprise IT operations including production/development servers, network infrastructure, and business systems (CRM, email, collaboration) across hybrid cloud environment.
• Active Directory Modernization: Executed complete domain restructure to support rapid business growth; implemented Hyper-V virtualization and group policies for enhanced network management.
• M&A Integration: Provided technical leadership for getawaylounge.com.au (luxuryescapes.com) acquisition, managing seamless IT infrastructure integration and business system consolidation.
• Service Delivery & Operations: Established enterprise helpdesk with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, defined SLAs/KPIs, and successfully consolidated two office locations with zero business disruption.

• Global Infrastructure Management: Administered 14 servers (Windows Server 2003/2008, Linux) across 5 international sites (Beijing, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Los Angeles, Sydney) with multi-site WAN/VPN connectivity.
• Enterprise Systems: Managed Active Directory, Exchange 2003/2007, Citrix Metaframe, SQL databases, and Symantec Backup Exec for business continuity.
• Cloud Migration & Modernization: Led migration of on-premises infrastructure (Email, File Storage, Media Content) to cloud-based solutions, achieving significant cost savings and improved scalability.
• Network & Telephony: Executed bandwidth upgrade projects and managed full VOIP migration from traditional telephony systems.
• Business Applications: Maintained critical systems including Smartjog, Sage AccPac, INSONIC media management, SharePoint, and video production suites with Final Cut Pro.

Certifications

• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator — Associate
• CompTIA A+ Hardware — Certificate
• CompTIA A+ Operating Systems — Certificate
• CompTIA Network+ — Certificate
• Customer Contact Certificate — ICT20102
• Microsoft Certified Professional — Windows 2000

Technical Skills